The present invention relates to a disk drive apparatus that carries out information retrieval only, or both the retrieving and recording of information, on a rotating disk recording medium. More particularly, this invention relates to a loading mechanism for disk drive apparatuses, such as a CD-ROM, a DVD-ROM, and a DVD-RAM that uses an apparatus in which the recording medium is arranged vertically.
It is known that disk drive apparatuses of the desktop type, such as CD-ROM or DVD drives, are typically mounted horizontally. To set up a disk drive apparatus with a horizontal disposition is to set up the disk drive apparatus so that the rotating axis extends vertically.
In describing a conventional disk drive apparatus, the disk loading of an apparatus which is oriented vertically is not considered in the description provided in the Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 10-21677, which relates to disk loading mechanism for a disk drive apparatus which sets up horizontally.
Especially, to prevent a disk from falling out of the mechanism at the time of disk loading, there is a disk drive apparatus for a desktop, which has only disk guide parts like a claw for preventing the disk from falling out, which parts are equipped on the periphery of the disk-receiving face on a disk tray. The disk-receiving face has a circular groove or recess in which a disk is mounted. The disk falling out refers to a disk coming off of the disk-receiving face of the disk tray. In the prior mechanism, the overlapping between the disk and the disk guides can not be increased due to the limitation of the size of the disk-receiving face relative to the external diameter of the disk. Therefore, it can be said that such prior mechanisms were not very effective in providing stable disk loading.
If the overlapping part is small, the disk may be damaged by falling out, when the user inserts the disk into the disk tray. And, the disk may also be damaged by contact between the disk and internal parts of the apparatus, if the disk falls out of the disk tray when the disk is loaded into the apparatus under the condition described above. In addition, error chucking may occur under the condition described above, when the disk is chucked to the spindle motor. As mentioned above, there may occur a problem in that disk loading cannot be stably carried out, if the disk is loaded with a vertical orientation and held on the disk tray with the disk guide only.
The object of this invention is to prevent the generation of the above-mentioned problem, so as to carry out stable disk loading.
A disk drive apparatus according to this invention is characterized by a disk tray having a disk-receiving face shaped in the form of a circular groove or recess for mounting a recording disk thereon, and having a plurality of disk holding parts for holding a recording disk onto said disk-receiving face, a disk loading mechanism for loading/unloading said disk tray in/out of the apparatus, and a disk position regulator placed near said disk tray when said disk tray is loaded/unloaded, and having a contact surface contacting a part of a rim of the recording disk, which contact surface faces in a direction toward which an opposite side of the rim of the recording disk, relative to the part of the rim of the recording disk by contacted said contact surface, is pushed to said disk-receiving face.
The contact surface of the regulator may be made to be slope or curved surface. The regulator may be placed at a position in which it contacts the recording disk when the recording disk is loaded with the disk L@y into the apparatus.
Still further advantages of the present invention will become apparent to those of ordinarily skill in the art upon reading and understanding the following detailed description of the preferred and alternate embodiments.